John McCain supported the idea of more U.S. troops in Baghdad in early 2007, yet criticized the Bush administration for sending just the minimum number of forces and for splitting the surge’s command between U.S. and Iraqi military officers, Josh Marshall writes. McCain has now abandoned the central tenets of the surge by expressing support for Iraqi Prime Minister’s Nouri al-Maliki’s call for a U.S. troop withdrawal timetable and has turned to attacking Obama’s patriotism, Marshall writes.